Arizona State Senator Judy Burges believes efficiency programs are a way to create a one-world government

Citing conspiracy theories about “a one-world order,” the Arizona Tea Party is attempting to slip a bill through the legislature that could strip programs designed to help residents in the state become more energy efficient.

The bill’s sponsor, Arizona State Senator Judy Burges, says her goal is to wipe out any environmental program administered or funded by the government to prevent “social engineering … including where we live, what we eat.”

Burges’ bill, Senate Bill 1507, is based upon an unfounded conspiracy theory about “Agenda 21,” a non-binding international plan for environmentally-sustainable development crafted by the United Nations. The plan was adopted in 1992 by 178 countries, including the United States under the George H.W. Bush administration.

Burges and other members of the Tea Party believe that clean energy programs in Arizona are a plot by the United Nations to create a single world government in order to control people’s lives. AZ Central reported on SB 1507:

The bill would bar the state and Arizona counties and cities “from adopting or implementing the United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.”

Under the provisions of Burges’ bill, the state, counties and cities could not accept funds from, spend funds from or give funds to “certain non-governmental organizations,” including non-profit groups and contractors, for any of the declaration’s initiatives.

Wes Harris, a Phoenix resident and tea-party member, also testified with Burges, repeating theories about the declaration that have been floated among conservative organizations such as the John Birch Society, which refer to the declaration as “Agenda 21.”

Harris claimed the declaration “is an attempt to implement a one-world order. It’s been going on for 20 years. It has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate. It has been snuck around the back door by the Clinton administration.”

The Arizona conspiracy bill has already moved through the Senate, through a House committee, and is now set for discussion on the House floor. If passed by the House, the bill could block state and municipal programs that help home and business owners invest in energy efficiency improvements.

Chad Campbell, the Democratic House Minority Leader called the legislation “the most ludicrous … I’ve seen in six years…. You could pretty much shut down any form of government sustainability” program.

An onlooker with the Sierra Club called it “wacky.”

The bill was crafted through a “strike-everything” amendment, which allows a legislator to re-write an existing law with limited scrutiny. Burges has substituted language in an unemployment bill with the Agenda 21 wording that would severely limit Arizona’s ability to adopt efficiency and clean energy programs.

This isn’t the first conspiracy theory Judy Burges has been involved in. She is also a fierce “birther” who questions President Obama’s citizenship, despite being presented with a certificate of live birth.

Her previous attempts to pass legislation demanding Obama’s long form birth certificate have failed. But this latest conspiracy-laden bill actually has momentum in the Arizona legislature — threatening to derail the state’s valuable clean energy programs in the process.

Yes, they do want to leave the earth a smoking cinder. Ideally, they’d like to have a sweet little island for themselves, everyone else burned to death. I don’t understand people like that, but I do understand it is what they want.

There is a Koch document from a decade ago in which they openly state that the people should be told there is no climate change because they might react and cause trouble, because “they don’t understand that technology will have it under control by that time.”

Well, it’s here, technology hasn’t it under control, and they are making every effort to stop anyone else from even trying.

World War II, 1939–1945, resulted in an unprecedented scale of destruction of lives (over 60 million dead, most of them civilians), and the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Some of the acts committed against civilians during the war were on such a massive scale of savagery, they came to be widely considered as crimes against humanity itself. As the war’s conclusion drew near, many shocked voices called for the establishment of institutions able to permanently prevent deadly international conflicts. This led to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, which adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Many, however, felt that the UN, essentially a forum for discussion and coordination between sovereign governments, was insufficiently empowered for the task. A number of prominent persons, such as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and Mohandas K. Gandhi, called on governments to proceed further by taking gradual steps towards forming an effectual federal world government. The United Nations main goal is to work on international law, international security, economic development, human rights, social progress, and eventually world peace. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_government

The most extreme, wacky, and dangerous elements of the Republican Party now form its base. Belief in absolutely crazy conspiracies is a hallmark. Even Romney engages in pandering to this crowd. If you elect crazy people you will get crazy legislation.

Some really extreme and strange stuff legislatively comes out of Arizona. Both houses of the state legislature recently passed almost unanimously and anonymously that they think solves Internet trolls.

It will always be..if there are always corporations. Corporations by their nature, by their definitions, by Law, must not only maximize profits (and that means short term profits even if longer term is destruction) but also they must Externalize All Costs – at all costs. Ergo, a sane liveable future means that Another World is not only “possible” but in fact Necessary. If you keep corporations, we don’t have that sane future. (No, the Nordic countries do not prove that capitalism can be sustainable. They just have not gone as far, but give them enough years, and they will go as far as the US to maximize their Supreme Imperative. By then, of course the US will have done even farther into madness than today (unless we turn things around from the ground up by grassroots networking from locales) ..

It has long been recognized as being immoral to pollute your neighbors dwelling. Now that Corporations are people, amoral corporations must recognize this. Corpor/People need to acknowledge this reality and learn to play nice with others. Bought congress folks “legalities” cannot over ride long standing human rights.

Education should be a lifelong process. Such people obviously require the services of re-education centers, where they should remain until their education and attitude modification process is complete.

This shows the average T Party Member has the IQ of about 85 (not to poke fun at those who are mentally challenged) The T Party offers nothing to the national political consciousness to find solutions for the profound issues we face- except for finding those solutions by looking up their asses.

Really? Let’s just be clear….she is against any program that assists in energy efficiency, even if GWBush allowed it, but has no problem whatsoever taking pre-written legislation from the Koch Brothers, via ALEC and cut and pasting it and presenting as her own work? Really?

what a wacko.. these are the kinds of things that make America the laughingstock of the world… maybe this delusional woman thinks this is way for her delusional party to win elections? (well, they also think messing with women’s rights and health care is also a winner.. who can figure out these wackos anymore… )

What is happening in Arizona is in many ways a living laboratory of what happens when an already conservative party determines by experiencing repetitive failure that it is not conservative enough. Add a goodly amount of fear of the “other”, inherent paranoia (See: Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, 1964) and good old fashioned racism, and it all results in a Devil’s brew of Goebbels-like depth.

Arizona is but one example. Recently, a group of New Hampshire lawmakers introduced legislation that would require the citation of legal precedent from Magna Carta for any new legislation, which will be useful should New Hampshire be compelled to return any Welshman to their “lands and liberties” or for the judgment of their peers.

Sadly, I could go on and on, and we’ve all read with varying levels of humor, amazement, and incredulity of the various deranged legislation and proposals from wherever the Tea Party and their ilk have inserted themselves into the work of governing. I think we could mostly agree the results have been mixed, but even in the cases of near universal opposition to laws such as the one proposed by Sen. Burges, Tea Partiers and other ultra-conservatives don’t seem fazed in the least, a function, I believe, of an apparent insulation from reality and a demonstrated imperviousness to facts.

Arizona, along with other states, is quickly making itself over into an economic pariah, and as soon as the negative effects can be differentiated by the citizens there from the overall effects of the current recession there, I predict some swift reversals.

But a greater, longer-term problem remains. An old song wondered how we would keep him “on the farm” after he had seen Paris. The far right, under whatever banner, has had some success in legislating however unpopular and divorced from reality it may be. In the inevitable backlash against them, they will not go quietly. Hofstadter predicted the worldview/mindset represented by the current far right would always be with us, and if true, our work is cut out for us.

I used to think that Texas was the prime example of a state too crazy to be allowed self-government. Now I’m pretty sure that Arizona has stepped up and taken the prize. Hopefully at some point soon, someone will be daring enough to give them what they ask for, and haul the state legislature off to the booby hatch and/or prison

If Democrats are serious about killing this farce of a bill, they should use the same tactics Republicans use – amend it to death with provisions the GOP will hate or threaten to shut down the govt of AZ.

A suspended renewable energy incentive program in Wisconsin has businesses, residents and supporting organizations frustrated with the state Public Service Commission.

Since 2011, the Focus on Energy Program has provided financial incentives as directed by state law to renewable energy projects including biodigesters, wind and solar systems. It was temporarily suspended for businesses in July 2011 by program administrator Shaw Environmental, which cited lack of funds due to the program’s outstanding popularity.

Though the program was supposed to be reinstated before the end of the year, that has yet to occur, and groups such as RENEW Wisconsin and Clean Wisconsin are encouraging stakeholders and the public to speak up. “It is now the spring of 2012, and neither Shaw nor the Public Service Commission, which oversees Focus, have said a peep about when they will again offer incentives, as required by law,” said Don Wichert, executive director of RENEW Wisconsin. http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/6243/groups-push-to-reinstate-suspended-wis-renewables-incentive

The only aim of this bill is to prevent people from establishing their independence from corporate energy providers. The fact that these legislators would offer up such laughable straw man explanations goes to show how feeble minded their constituents are.

This isn’t the first conspiracy theory Judy Burges has been involved in. She is also a fierce “birther” who questions President Obama’s citizenship, despite being presented
with a certificate of live birth.

We all know that Obama was not born in Kenya and his father was not a British Citizen and that Obama did was not a foreign aid student and that his posted Birth Certificate was not the product of fraud with photo shop!

The irony is that the people who are less dependent on fossil fuels energy in the future will be more economically secure. That will particularly true for the southwestern states as drought and rising temperatures create an increasingly inhospitable environment. The tea party is guaranteeing that fewer will be prepared for the high costs and consequences of dirty energy.

I keep waiting for signs of sanity among conservatives but they are only becoming more extreme with every passing day. It is very difficult to be hopeful about the future of this country with Burgess and the rest of the tea clowns doubling down on stupidity.

One reason the one world government global conspiracy gains traction is because of the rather strange interpretation based on the Bible that talks about the antiChrist instituting the one world government. So they fight against any perceived one world government.

Which seems even more bizarre when this particular group of Christians often look forward to, and even court, other signs of the end times. Based on that logic you’d think they’d be cheering anything that points to another sign of the end times, such as this one world government this politician thinks she sees.

The political dynamics at play here are as fascinating as they are depressing.

This is the (near-)end game of Rovian politics. The Karl Rove model was very simple: Appeal very strongly to a small but extreme slice of the electorate, nearly all of whom will will show on voting day. The problem is that as you push this approach harder and harder, you wind up alienating ever more of the people in the middle of the spectrum. Eventually you’re doing yourself more harm than good, as measured in net gain of votes. That’s when you have to decide whether to step back from the crazy or double down and push it even harder. Looking at the presidential candidates the GOP is running (and those they shunned or who shunned them), it’s clear the GOP has become a victim of its prior success with this tactic. But they haven’t yet figured out how to reverse course.

We’re seeing the first signs of Fox News, of all places, tacking more toward center and away from crazyville, but there’s no telling how far that will go. I’m sure some of their carefully cultivated, red meat craving, brain checked at the door watchers don’t like things like FN praising the Volt, but I have no idea if that’s 10% or 90% of their viewership.

This mess in AZ presents an interesting case, in that the state is small enough to be allowed to screw up. They want crazy? Fine — let them wallow in crazy and create a gargantuan mess that will serve as an example to the rest of the country.

If you consider the unprecedented levels of cooperation between nations that would be required to reduce emissions as drastically and quickly as climate science demands, how is fear of a one world government particularly paranoid? To an authoritarian who considered for a moment, “what if the climate scientists are right?” wouldn’t denying the need for a ‘one world government’ to oversee the drastic change in the fundamental paradigm our civilization is based upon make you seem to be psychotic?

Of course the opposite is true; doing nothing and spurning on global warming will led to catastrophic events which will become more and more plain, this will one day cause many will call for a one world government to deal with the world wide problem.

I often wonder if this course of action is plain stupidity, or a dark conspiracy with puppet masters wishing to accomplish the very thing which is being railed against.

Joe, Senator Burges deserves to have an award named after her. Maybe call it “The Judy Burges Short Loaf Award” and let readers nominate candidates every month. First prize is a list of all the psychiatrists in their district; second prize is a coupon for a carbon monoxide detector; and third is a small pocket mirror so they can look themselves in the eye. An accompanying certificate would be nice, along with a press release to the newspapers in the winner’s district. And of course we all could email our congrats to the winners.

Act now! As so many have noted PROFIT, the only goal of corporations, underlies this nonsense.
Join with others in non-partisan groups to pass a Constitutional amendment the says ” corporations are not people” and “money is not speech.”
See http://www.movetoamend.org and many others.

Scientific Study: Dumb people are too dumb to recognize a smart thing when they see/hear it. Conserve? Why would I want to manage resources smartly? Why would I want to leave anything for my 5 year old when he grows up? The earth is not like a glass of water that when it is empty it is empty. The world will magically keep creating natural resources.

Take a look and listen to the crap that spews from Rupert Murdoch and his telephone hacking FOX media empire, and don’t forget the Father Coughlin stepchild, Rush Limbaugh
The counterpart of the USA Tea Party is the UK Tax Payers Alliance.
These Murdoch puppet freak-shows are anti-rail transit/anti-new technology that does not slurp gazzoline and drive-thru junk food.
The lack of public transport and total automobile dependency in USA & Canada is a major cause of obesity & diabetes and an 800 billion expense for creamy black crude oil… (petro-diabesity).